Migrating Mission-Critical Environments to Intel® Architecture

Data Center Migration for Mission-Critical Environments

IT@Intel White Paper

Executive Overview

As part of a multiyear strategy, in 1992 Intel IT began migrating Intel’s most mission-critical computing environments from proprietary systems to Intel® architecture. These environments include silicon design, manufacturing, and global enterprise resource planning (ERP).

Intel’s business results rely on these environments, so we approached the migrations with caution. Ultimately, however, the migrations were less difficult—and the benefits greater—than we originally anticipated. By using a phased approach and implementing best practices derived from our experiences, we minimized or eliminated most risks and successfully completed each migration with little or no interruption to core business activities.

Success depended upon breaking the migration for each environment into manageable phases, timing migration to coincide with other upgrades to business-critical systems, and developing a center of technical expertise to provide leadership and guidance in defining and executing the overall strategy.

• Improved system performance to increase productivity and support faster time to market for Intel® products.• Increased return on investment and decreased operational costs due to industry-standard servers and clients.• Ability to choose the best hardware for the workload because Intel’s open standard enables the same OS on any Intel-based platform.• Decreased data center footprint due to space- and energy-efficient servers.• Savings of more than USD 1.4 billion over five years.